


Stripped Clear

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [11]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Daemon Severance, Gen, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Medical Examination, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-18 17:01:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5936107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa survives the Citadel, and she pays the costs and pretends she doesn't know what her debt will do to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the first of the series to lean heavily on the events of the previous - you _have_ to have read [Bones of Crown and Silver](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5850943/chapters/13485877) to get some major plot points from this one, including the starting point. So if you haven't read that, go do that real quick! I'll wait.

Furiosa had no illusions about what would happen to Angharad. The girl was young, and full-life, and though she didn’t seem to know it, beautiful. If Joe didn’t take her himself, she would be put among the other Citadel breeders, which was worse.

But Furiosa didn’t lie to herself, tangled with War Boys in the dirt, the smell of rubber and guzzoline ground into the dust, into her teeth. She knew Joe too well. Angharad, bold and bright and golden, would be irresistible. She coughed and growled, pulling against the hands that pinned her arms up against her back, that pressed her head into the ground. The Imperator was still laughing. He dealt with her last, stopped with his boots in front of her face and it was all Furiosa could do not to spit.

“What’s this?” he asked his daemon, and the wolf leaned forward, recklessly close to War Boy hands, to sniff at the bandaged remnants of her arm. Furiosa growled and jerked away, bared her teeth right back at the daemon.

“Full-life. But she’s got no daemon,” _Alexos_ said, snarling back at her. “What did you want done with her?”

The Imperator laughed again and put his boot on her cheek. And Furiosa could do no more than hate him, which she did with a deep burning she had not felt since the last time she’d seen Joe. “We’ll see what she’s made of, under all that muck. Bring her up. Make her a War Boy.”

One of his crew said something, ground out a protest that only lasted a few words before the Imperator had silenced it with a kick. The War Boys fell silent with a mutter, and they dragged Furiosa to her feet. She might have fought harder, even run, if this had not been the exact thing she had been shouting at the lift drivers a little more than thirty days ago. Fighting to go back among the Wretched was no option, but if Angharad had been out there, watching from the edges of the causeway, Furiosa would have gone. She would have gone in a heartbeat.

It didn’t matter, of course. Angharad was gone, and Furiosa was here, and she let herself be pulled into the shadows of the lift and handed off like so much scrap.

 

They didn’t have to do much to make her a War Boy. She had the brand already, she had even ‘lost’ her daemon. It was, however, her first trip into the Blood Shed; the Organic Mechanic had always come to the Vault, never the other way around. His smell had always preceded him, rotting flesh and sour skin and bloody metal, but here it was all-encompassing. She coughed and gagged, and that was all she allowed herself. The shudders that fought their way out of her bones were stifled, the bile in her throat swallowed through the scorch of acid. This was the Citadel, and she was not permitted such weaknesses.

Furiosa forced herself not to flinch at the cold shine of the silver blade against the back wall, the only thing shining in this place. It was bigger than a knife, or a saw, or any weapon you could use. She didn’t know the name for it, and she’d never seen it used, but the inside of her chest where Aurelio used to be shivered and got smaller, and she knew what it was for. Like everything, it was salvage in the end. The frame was made with old rail tracks, and the blade itself was scratched and slightly bent.

“Organic!”

“Eh?”

“Got a War Boy, Ripsaw wants her cleaned up.”

“ _Her?_ ”

“We don’t ask questions.”

There was a long hesitation before a grunted, “Right-o,” and Furiosa felt her heartbeat pick up. If she was recognized… she didn’t know what would happen, but she doubted it would be anything _good_. There was no such thing, in this place. She stared at the ground, fighting herself into a standstill as the dubious guard of War Boys left her alone. She wished she was alone. _What use are wishes in the Wasteland?_

“Never heard of a girl being a War Boy before,” Organic muttered, grabbing her arms and setting her back onto a stone bench. Above her, the creak of chains and the smell of rusty metal mingled with blood and piss and the mix of foulness she’d come to associate with one of the Wretched. Furiosa did not look, but she did move her eyes up from the floor. She couldn’t look at the Organic Mechanic without giving away who she was (what she had been) so she stared at the huge silver blade instead, fingers curling into a fist so tight she could feel the blood running down the back of her hand.

“Can’t see why you wouldn’t do more good up in the breeders’,” he kept on, and she knew he wasn’t talking _to_ her but she gritted her teeth and imagined them cutting through his skin, imagined his fingers, sticky and possessive on her thigh, dancing on the floor. Disappointed with her lack of reaction, the Mechanic only sighed and patted her arm. “What an Imperator wants, he gets. Suppose if he wants to compromise his crew with a Wretched breeder it ain’t none of my business.” At this, Furiosa couldn’t help but steal a glance; surely her face was the same? She’d been out of the Vault for a long time, but it seemed incredible that he wouldn’t _recognize_ her. But there was nothing but a vicious greed on his face, too-wet tongue stuck out between his teeth as he looked at her arm and pulled the bandage from her arm in a sickening echo of what Angharad had done just a few days ago. He wascareless of how the blood had stuck the cloth to her skin, mouth flicking up into a grinning grimace when she flinched as he tore the last of the filthy bandage from her skin-wrapped bone.

“Let’s see here then,” he muttered, pulling at the scabs, tugging at the loose bits of skin that hadn’t entirely adhered to her arm, and Furiosa bit her tongue and didn’t make a sound. For that, she was almost proud.

She didn’t whimper when he stitched it up, either, though he’d peeled apart her skin and inspected the inner wound before he’d do it, eyes flicking up every now and then to catch the pain she couldn’t keep off of her face. Furiosa went back to staring at the silver blade, pretending that the arm didn’t belong to her, and that the pain was happening to someone else. The light shone off the blade and bounced back into the Shed, giving a bluish quality to the otherwise dark place. No torches here, or lanterns, except in one corner that was full of needles and tubes and glass in strange shapes.

It was done, after an endless stretch of time where Furiosa couldn’t even feel the pinpricks of the needle in the midst of all the screaming her skin was already doing. The Organic Mechanic leaned back to inspect his work, and she felt one of the endless knots in her chest start to unwind. He grunted in a wordless satisfaction, holding up her arm to get better light on it, then pulled her back to her feet in a sudden jerk that almost caught her off balance. Almost. Furiosa hissed, and he laughed at being able to finally get _something_ out of her.

“If you weren’t such a waste of my time, I’d put alcohol on that, keep it clean,” he said, standing far too close to her, his nose wrinkling when he smiled, like a pig’s. “But you’ll be dead within a month, full-life or not.” He licked his lips, looked up her up and down like inspecting a wound for impurities, and Furiosa didn’t allow herself the snarl she wanted, or the fist to his throat. If she was to be a War Boy, then she would be one. _Survive_ , her mother’s voice whispered, faint as a breeze in the Wretched camps. For a moment she felt her link with Aurelio shiver with remembrance, and then it went quiet again. It no longer hurt so much to have him apart, but her sense of him was almost gone. She knew he was alive, but unless she was putting her full attention into the link, that was all she knew.

It was Furiosa who backed away, not having said a single word. Organic laughed again, a small chuckle that made her want to curl her lip and spit to clear her taste of the Blood Shed in her mouth. “You go find your ‘crew’,” he called after her, cleaning the needle on a fold of his leather apron. “But if you want to live, you’ll find your way back here, War Bitch.”


	2. Chapter 2

 

Why had she wanted to be a War Boy? Because they had more chances at survival at the Wretched? Furiosa laughed inside her head at the thought.

Because it was possible, no matter how small the chances, that she could get close enough to Joe to splatter his blood on the floor? No. She wanted it, more than anything she’d ever wanted, could taste his death in the back of her mouth, but she knew herself. If the chance came, it would not be a chance she could survive the fallout from. And if refusing to take that chance made her a coward, so be it. Aurelio was the reckless one.

Had it been the cars, the only creatures in the Citadel with a chance at a good lifespan? Had she wanted the chance to steal one, to roar away and fang it back to her real home, which already seemed distant as a dream? Not that that could ever happen; the wheels were kept on an altar in the back of the Blood Shed, where a fire always burned under the Immortan’s skull.

Whatever she had thought, down in the dust among the Wretched, whatever she had wanted, it was not this. She left Organic’s stinking lair only to lose herself in the twisted tunnels of the Center Tower. Nothing made sense; stairs went up and down and diagonal and the floors sloped so that one level bled into another like the shifting rainbows on an oil spill.

War Boys glared at her as she walked past, or they showed leering smiles with too many teeth. None of them spoke to her, and Furiosa could not bring herself to ask them for help. There were other people in the tunnels, Wretched with tools held in their hands like prayers, daemons with ribs holding out stretched-tight skin like desperate flags. And once, a wide-hipped woman with despair in her eyes and hatred on her mouth, who walked past with a veil across the lower half of her face and did not glance at Furiosa. Her daemon was a gull, feathers grey with dirt and skin paled by darkness. He was chained to her wrist with what looked like gold, shimmering a little in the smoky light.

Furiosa could no more ask them for help then she could have asked the walls themselves. As the cold stone pressed in on her, damp and gritty and smelling of piss, she found a few words folding themselves into the back of her mind at the same pace as her heartbeat. _Can’t trust them_ , she thought, and wasn’t sure where the mantra came from. _Can’t trust them. Can’t trust them._ At least it was true. She was not one of them, not a War Boy not a breeder not a Wife not Wretched. She was _Furiosa of the Green Place_ and she would stay that way.

With that to cling to, and nothing else but the burning, wrenching ache of her arm, Furiosa gritted her teeth and walked until they found her. Three War Boys who stopped and looked at her, one with black grease faded to gray by his paint in broad stripes above his eyes. “You’re the one,” he said, voice rasping and rough and even under his white paint she could see the bruises on his throat. Wherever they came from, it didn’t bode well for her. “The half-arm. Come on.”

When she hesitated, the War Boy didn’t. He slammed her back against the wall, put an arm up against her throat and bared his teeth. “I wasn’t _asking_ , bitch.” The other two crowded up behind him, but all Furiosa could feel was anger, swirling under her ribs, and she curled her lips back from white teeth to snarl. “Ripsaw might say make you a War Boy, but you’re nothing but Wretched, and don’t you forget it. You get in the way of my crew and I’ll gut you.”

She brought up her legs to kick him back, and the War Boy went with a grunt of lost breath. Furiosa wanted to rub at the ache in her throat, but she only settled back in a fighter’s crouch and flexed her whole hand. “Don’t worry,” she said, her voice bruised but solid. “I won’t get in your way.”

The grey-headed War Boy held back his backup with one hand, still hunched over and coughing for breath. He nodded, but Furiosa saw eyes glittering with vengeance in the smoky cave, and she heard words like the click of stone on metal in the back of her head. _Can’t trust them_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hear you guys want to know what happens to the War Boys' daemons? Be careful. Like everything in the Citadel, it's ugly underneath.

There was one duty that Furiosa hated more than all the others. She had been a War Boy for fifty-five days, smashed her knuckles into faces and walls and cars. Busted her knees on ribs and lancer’s perches, torn her skin in a hundred places from falling, from being pushed, from jumping down to avoid worse hurts. And every time, she swallowed the blood in her mouth and stood up. She could take all that. Being in a War Boy crew was kind of like being part of a feral pack, with strict rules and violent enforcement. Furiosa, one-armed and still awkward with it, was down at the bottom of the pack, given all the worst jobs and worst places and kicked at by every single member of the crew, even the shivery Bonzer, whose half-life was almost over and who could barely keep his food down.

The Imperator who had raised her up, Ripsaw, seemed too busy to corner her properly, though he smirked and his wolf daemon licked his chops whenever they came to the caves where his crew were working on cars or scrapping, seeing her with bloodshot eyes and moving slower with bruised ribs. He certainly never got close enough for Furiosa to figure out _why_ he had done what he did, too busy basking in the favor the Immortan had given him for snagging a new Wife. Angharad. But that was never what she was called, because to them she was just a breeder. Furiosa listened, and touched the sore edges of her skin where the stitches pulled tight, and held her friend’s name like a lantern in her chest. Angharad.

But among the shit jobs she was given, there was one Furiosa hated with a low rage that burned like bile in the back of her throat. Because every ten days, they made the oldest and the best Pups into War Boys, and they did it by cutting away their daemons.

The silver blade was dragged out of the Organic Mechanic’s lair and set up near the V8 altar, looking almost like chrome in the firelight. Pups with white paint (some with tumors already on their arms, their backs. Some with scars in the shape of engines) and black eyes and eager little daemons pressed forward, hands reaching for the sacred wheels of cars that would be spinning long after their half-lives were through. There was an Imperator there to sort through them, thank whatever hellish God remained that _that_ wasn’t Furiosa’s job.

They were happy to do it, some of them, sitting on opposite sides of the slightly-bent blade and almost bouncing with excitement. Now it was time grow up, learn how to shoot and cut and kill, and maybe if you were lucky you’d make it to Valhalla, where your daemon would be waiting. (Furiosa knew that was a lie. She knew what made up the shadows that gathered like vultures in the corners of the Blood Shed. The hungry teeth and mismatched shapes of daemons without humans, who turned poisonous and hungry like everything in the Citadel. Angharad had warned her of them, said that some of the bigger ones got brave enough to want human meat, but Furiosa had never seen so many as the syrupy throngs of them that gathered on the days they turned Pups into War Boys. She’d seen Organic throw the occasional daemon in their direction, just after the cutting, when the child’s daemon was in shock and so alone. Like throwing scraps of meat to a dog.)

Though she tried not to think of it, most of these Pups were the same age Furiosa had been when she’d gotten her name, when she’d been taken as an initiate into the Swaddle Dog clan. In some horrible parody of the pride she’d felt at becoming one of them, the War Pups stepped shakily away from the huge silver blade, and it was her job to steer them out, to sit them on a slab outside under the hanging cages full of blood bags, and whisper that it’d be okay. That they’d grow strong. Sometimes she could tell them that they’d burn fast and hot over the sands, they’d drive pursuit vehicles and throw thunder sticks and it'd be every bit as good as the older Boys said. Sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to lie like that, and she sat with them in silence, wary of the hungry shadows that would love to take a bite of her and her charges. She pressed little canisters of chrome into their child-sized hands and led them back to the barracks, though sorting them into crews was the job of Imperators who needed bodies replaced.

This was the job she hated more than anything else in the Citadel. In the rest of her duties as part of Ripsaw’s crew, she barely had to pretend the veneration the War Boys treated Joe with. She could ignore the flaming skulls and chains, because they didn’t matter. Her job did. With the Pups, telling them Joe’s lies _became_ her job, and she despised it. It was those days that she wished hardest for Aurelio, who was out in the blue sky somewhere, wings wide and feathers hot under the sun. More than anything she wished that she could go to sleep one day and just wake up with her daemon. She wouldn’t mind giving up this body, lopsided and scarred and she couldn’t remember not being in pain in some way or another. If she could just wake up and fly with Aurelio, that wouldn’t be so bad.

But humans weren’t daemons, and so Furiosa did what she was best at. She survived it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovely, lovely readers, thank you a million for all the comments! they really do keep me fueled and writing. :)

There were plenty of War Boys who thought she was a breeder, put in a crew by some Imperator’s lust or mistake or stupidity. Furiosa was glad to teach them otherwise; violence among War Boys was nothing, so long as it didn’t end in death. Plenty of Boys were happy to toe that line, but they loved to press right up against the edge of it. Guns and knives were mostly for cowards, for War Boys who couldn’t do the fighting right.

Furiosa would have loved a gun or a knife. She didn’t care about _right_ , she cared about staying alive. But just like with the Wretched, everything was worth something, and she didn’t have the trade or the leverage to get hold of a loaded gun or a knife unless she broke a piece off the undercarriage of a car and sharpened it herself. While that remained a possibility, she had plenty of fighting to do before then.

War Boys who touched her learned not to, if they wanted to keep their fingers. She spat blood on the ground that wasn’t hers along with the twitching trigger finger, and they called him Spit after that, a humiliating nick-name that even Furiosa curled her lip to hear.

They hated her more than anything, Boys like Crasher (who’d tried to choke her out her first day) and Spit. Furiosa knew she would have to kill them, sooner or later, but that was the one thing you didn’t do, unless you were kamikrazee. Imperators didn’t stand for War Boys killing each other.

Most of her crew didn’t need lessons so harsh, especially after Spit’s example. Just like with a feral pack, once she’d established that she could (and would) defend herself, they mostly left her alone. It didn’t mean she could avoid the abuse heaped on her just for virtue of being the newest there, the one-armed War Boy, the girl, but it meant she could sleep with one eye open instead of not sleeping at all.

Sleeping was something she did very rarely, these days. It made her worse at everything, when she was already falling behind on everything from lance throwing to hooking up brake lines, but it was better than waking with white hands over her mouth, pulling at her clothes. So far that remained a nightmare, not reality, but Furiosa quivered with the closeness of her fear, took it and tempered it in anger until her snarl could make even the cockiest War Boy take a few steps back.

Furiosa fought, and maybe it was just the fact of her fighting that kept her in the ranks, but as her arm healed and she grew more used to its absence, she forced herself back into the making of war with a fierceness that meant nothing but survival. She cut herself a knife from the bumper of a pursuit vehicle and her first task was to rip out the stitches in her arm, one by one, because anything was better than going back to Organic when she wasn’t ordered to.

It still would have been suicide to let her out on a patrol with the crew, fumbling and clumsy as she was, but she started to collect bits of scrap from the garages when no one was looking, human fingers regaining their old Vuvalini quickness to snatch at bits of leather, scraps of broken wrenches and tires and tubing. These things she hid on a ledge outside the sleeping caves, collecting nothing but dust right now but fuel for an arm she could use, one day. She didn’t even mark the moment she began looking beyond just the day she was living, when she started to realize that she wouldn’t die today, or tomorrow.

There _was_ a moment, though, when Furiosa marked the point she’d become a War Boy. It was a hundred and thirteen days after she’d been lifted up, after Angharad had been taken to the Vault. Furiosa was heading to her spot on the stone slabs War Boys used to sleep, a place that she almost could call hers because no one else set foot there while she was present. It was a tiny scrap of corner that she defended with her fist and her teeth and her tire-soled boots. Her crew had just gotten off of a full day carting rocks up to the top of the Garage Tower. It was nothing more than punishment duty, a punishment that Furiosa resented more than anyone else because she should have been the one on that patrol, not Bonzer.

The shaking, fevered War Boy had lost his mind on the back of the War Rig, coming back from the Bullet Farm. Furiosa wasn’t there, and it wasn’t like anyone looked at her long enough to tell her what’d happened, but they came back three Boys short from an untouched supply run, and Ripsaw was fucking pissed.

So they’d spent the day hauling rocks. It was over now, and Furiosa was feeling the weight of every bone in her body, aching and tired but never unguarded. The rest of her crew spread out across the ledges of stone with a chorus of mutters and groans; they felt safe here, in the depths of the central Tower. She found it almost funny (on some days) that this was the place she felt least safe.

And today there was someone (more than one someone) to prove her paranoia justified. Coming up behind her, too close too fast, and Furiosa spun around with a punch before she could think. The hit landed, too, knocked back a War Boy with one eye burned shut and the speckled scars of gunpowder on his face.

There were two others with him, and Furiosa had always hated her odds but that wouldn’t stop her from fighting. “Best keep back if you want to keep your trigger fingers,” she said, curling her lips away from her white teeth, full-life and solid, clicking them together for emphasis.

“Fucking War Bitch,” the speckle-scarred one said, holding a hand to his mouth, wiping away blood. Furiosa didn’t shake out her fist, though she wanted to. She would need the half-seconds between making a fist and using it. It wasn’t so strange that she didn’t recognize any of them – most War Boys had a grudge against her that wasn’t really personal. “Wait till I get you pinned.”

She didn’t bother answering. She would need all of her breath, too, and there was no point in wasting it on scar-eyed War Boys. Three against one was bad; the only time she’d had to go three against one had been in one of the narrower piping tunnels, and the cramped space had worked in her favor. Now they were brawling in the open space of the barracks, and the only way anyone would interfere was if she was pushed down on top of them.

There was a steadiness to her that only came with fighting. Furiosa side-stepped the first lunge and brought her knee up into the War Boy’s belly, her shortened arm down on his back at the elbow. He dropped with a satisfying _oomph_ , but it meant she was off-balance when one-eye shoved her back, arms windmilling and then caught by the third. Furiosa wrenched her way out of his hands before he could get a solid hold, tried to turn and land a proper punch, but the minute her back was on him the speckled War Boy was shoving at her again, too close, trying to grapple, a sour, chalky smell in her nose. She jerked her head back and felt it _crack_ against his chin, felt her mind go hot and dizzy even as his hands loosened.

And then, strangely, she was free. Furiosa stumbled forward a step, expecting a foot in her face or at the backs of her knees. Her eyes were still blurred and frustratingly teary from the head butt, and she thought for half a second that she was imagining the solid _thump_ of a white-painted body getting slammed into the cold stone floor. She shook her head to clear it, ran her hand across her eyes, and rocked back into a ready crouch, exhausted but not ready to give up. _Never_.

Only it was Plug looking back at her curiously. He was a War Boy on Ripsaw’s crew, with the wiring and metal bars of old electrical plugs hanging from his ears and embedded in his nose. He was sitting (kneeling) on top of one of her attackers, grinding the other Boy’s face down into the rock with the same unthinking concentration he used to pick apart old-time gadgets.

Roller and Vein were doing the same to the one-eyed War Boy who’d had his arms around her. Furiosa looked at them and shifted her feet backwards a little. “I’ll take down all of you if I need to,” she said, disgusted at how her voice wavered uncertainly in the middle. She had to be stronger than that.

“Sure you will,” Scraper was on Ripsaw’s crew too, a rev head with tumors peeling on his chest where he’d tried to scratch them off. “But _we_ won’t come up behind ya and snag someone else’s fight. That right, Boys?”

Furiosa almost flinched when the whole crew shouted their agreement. Most of them had stayed back on the ledges, but they’d all taken an interest in the fight, sitting up and leaning out and growling their… support. Furiosa stared at them, at Scraper, at Roller and Vein and Plug (who, to be fair, would do pretty much what you told him, and nothing else. He was hardier than most War Boys, which was why he’d got chosen to be a Pup to begin with, but he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the tunnel.) It seemed like she’d stepped outside of reality, like there was a trick behind this and in a minute she’d be fighting for her life again.

“You’re the worst War Bitch these fukashima barracks have ever seen,” Scraper continued, while Furiosa tried to find her mind’s footing in a world gone sideways. “But your _our_ fukashima War Bitch, ya hear? One of _our_ crew, not theirs.”

Though Furiosa had never, ever thought to hear someone call her _ours_ with anything but disgust, standing there in the War Boy caves, the muffled and almost child-like sincerity of it ringing in her ears, she _almost_ felt. Grateful. Relieved, anyway, that she wouldn’t have to fight them. Not today, anyway. She nodded, suddenly too tired to hold her head up properly, and when the crew made room for them on the nearest slabs she fell onto one without the energy to even glance at her own corner.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short chapter as my momentum runs itself down for a moment. Just gotta get from here to Imperator. Just need to figure out how to get there. :P

She met the Ace not long after the War Boys’ welcome. He was transferred to their crew in the wake of Bonzer’s kamikrazee stunt, along with two freshly cut Pups. Though Furiosa could not stand to be in the Pups’ vicinity for more than a few minutes, (they were too empty, aching and dark-eyed with their lost daemons, and perversely drawn to her like moths to a flame. She hated them, and they hated her in return, but that was nothing unusual for Furiosa.) she got along well with Ace. He was almost as outcast as she was, a thing unheard of. An old War Boy. _Too old to get into Valhalla_ , the others whispered when they thought he couldn’t hear. _He’ll go soft in the end. No proper War Boy, never saw a splash of chrome on him._

For his part, Ace took the disdain of his crew without a word, snapped out orders and took them just as quickly. He didn’t seem to care what they thought, and he wasn’t as eager to die as the rest of them. Since Furiosa had started as a lancer (the crew was so short-handed they were willing to put up with a War Boy with only one hand. The irony was not lost on her, but Imperator Ripsaw drove the War Rig, and that wasn’t something that could just be set aside while they trained up the new Pups.) she’d seen five War Boys die Witnessed on the Fury Road, all of them with chrome on their teeth and fanatically ready to die.

Ace had shaken his head from his place up on the Rig, settled down on his haunches after the Buzzards were off their backs and curled his fingers in a V8, close to his chest. Furiosa thought he might be the only sane War Boy in the Citadel.

After the fight with Flinger and the rest, she’d become part of the crew in more than name. But it wasn’t until she found herself behind the wheel of a vehicle that she realized she’d somehow gained _status_ among them. That she pushed Plug around with the same friendly shoves that the others did, that even the surly Gash (named for his cleft lip) stepped out when she told him to.

“You’ve got a reputation,” Ace said, and it was four more words than he’d ever spoken to her during a meal before. Furiosa only looked at him, mouth full of paste and wondering what he wanted from her. Sure she didn’t feel the same distant antagonism that fissioned between her and the other War Boys, but that didn’t mean they were _friends_.

“For what?” she asked, when she got tired of waiting. Ace grinned, gnawing at a lump of bread he must have begged off the servers, because it didn’t even look completely stale.

“Getting your lancer through the run. Knowing just when to slice through the pack, cut out the weak link, and _boom_ you’ve got another kill.”

“So?” she didn’t want to fall into the temptation to agree, or say it was just luck, or any one of the thousand postures that War Boys took to puff each other up.

“So, I think you’re what they used to call potential. You’re a full-life War Boy, for crying out loud.”

That phrase had very different connotations, nowadays. No one cried unless they couldn’t help it.

Furiosa thought about this for a while, chewing on salt and a little bit of vegetables and whatever unnamable gristle that got thrown in their rations. Ace seemed content to let them sit in silence, which was something else that none of the other Boys could do. The only time any of them ever shut up was when they were passed out, for one reason or another.

“What’s that got to do with you?” she asked at last, and Ace grimaced in a way that might almost have been a smile.

“They don’t think much of it,” he said, jerking his head down the table, to where the rest of their crew was attacking their food. “But I’ve got a lot of things tucked away in here.” He tapped the side of his head with one gnarled finger. “And I ain’t got much potential left, but I’ve got this. I figure we might work out a trade.”

Furiosa sat silent for a while, turning over the offer in her head. It was written in her bones that wisdom came with age, though she was dubious on exactly how much ‘wisdom’ a human War Boy could have, compared to the Vuvalini witches. She didn’t doubt that what Ace knew could be useful,but in what way? Her goal was survival, but that seemed assured. For today. For now. As much as any War Boy’s survival was assured. Furiosa didn’t think that she was in any position to bargain for better. But if Ace thought otherwise, then maybe she was. Maybe all she needed to do was pretend she had enough leverage for a trade, and she would get one.

“What’d you have in mind?”


	6. Chapter 6

She wouldn’t admit it out loud, but Furiosa liked working with Ace. He was a good teacher, patient and even though he was part of a generation that straddled the end of the world and the beginning of the Wasteland, he understood what that meant. Better than she did, probably. He also understood the Citadel from the bones out, which was something Furiosa would never be able to do. She might know it, and she was beginning to accept it for what it was, but she would never understand it the way Ace or a born War Boy did. Sometimes she was grateful for that. Sometimes she wished that whatever she’d done to deserve this life, she could undo it.

It was Ace’s fault that she got Ripsaw’s attention. Or. It was his idea. Because she was ‘potential,’ and she shared Ace’s distaste for the wastefulness of Valhalla, he thought she’d make a better Imperator. She was full-life, after all, and that was the only requirement. A full-life, and absolute undying loyalty to the Immortan. Ace didn’t talk about that part as much. Maybe he assumed it was a given. Furiosa didn’t know much about him, besides the fact that he was a War Boy old enough to remember what life had been like before Next Wednesday.

No one at the Citadel called it that. But it was how she’d learned about the end of the world, and she clung to every scrap of the Green Place that she could.

Ace thought she could make Imperator, and Furiosa could not have planned something more dangerous, or more suited to her goals. Imperators were much better treated than War Boys, not considered as replaceable, and best of all: given their own rooms.

It wasn’t that she despised the rest of her crew. Not the way she had when she’d first been raised up, and she knew they didn’t despise her either. But they were different creatures from the inside out, and Furiosa wouldn’t let them forget it. Roller complained that she never sat a proper block-prayer on Ten-day. Scraper argued with her for days after she forced Organic to take a proper look at his skin, to smear on an oily paste she traded for herself. And all of them, all of them could sense Aurelio in her, even if they didn’t know what they were feeling. It made her twitch, to feel their emptiness pressed in around her at night, even if it was safer to sleep nearby.

All the while, she filched scraps and tinkered in the barracks. After they’d gotten back from runs, after the day’s jobs were done, she would sit in the dim circles where skylights came through and piece together bits of metal, wire. She pocketed wrenches from the Garages, wire-clippers and needle-nosed pliers with dried blood still on the tips. It was slow work, made slower by her single hand, but by the time Furiosa was ready to put their plan into play the thing looked almost arm-like.

It would have been harder if Ripsaw hadn’t been so stupid.

“Thunder up!” he shouted, swaggering into their Garage with Alexos at his heels, the wolf’s mane already bristling. “We’re heading out!”

He was early, hours early; engines needed to be checked, dusted out. Fuel tanks filled. Wheels retrieved from the altar in the Central Tower. Normally Furiosa would have ground her teeth silently with the other Boys on the crew, put up with Ripsaw’s micro-managing, and gotten things done right whether he was impatient or not. War Boys didn’t need their hands held, they didn’t need to be told what to do every five minutes. The crew knew their business, and Ripsaw didn’t. Not when it came to his own vehicles.

But her goal was to force him back into a corner, one where he’d be forced to take her on. So Furiosa said, loud enough to echo even in the busy Garage, “We’ll be ready when the time’s right. Boss.”

Alexos’s head snapped around to glare at her, and Furiosa bared her teeth. She hadn’t forgotten that it was the wolf who’d spotted Angharad in the crowd, and Ripsaw who had pulled her out onto the causeway. She’d like nothing more than to kick the wolf’s ribs in, daemon or not.

“And I say when the time’s right, don’t I?” Ripsaw snarled, bearing down on her. Furiosa didn’t flinch, didn’t even shift her feet back into a better stance. She only glared at him, rage and hatred like lit guzz in her belly. “If I say the time’s now, then it’s now, War Bitch.”

The insult sounded different, coming from him. It sounded like he meant it to be demeaning, but it had been hers for so long that Furiosa thought it was more like a badge of honor. The only War Bitch in the Citadel. The only one tough enough to carry the name. She stared back, used to the feeling of sand in her eyes, and felt her heart thunder like a revved engine when the Imperator looked away first. Ripsaw turned to lay into Bones, one of the newer crew who’d lost the skin and muscle off the side of his arm when a nomad got hold of the Boy’s machete.

Furiosa grinned to herself, wished briefly (like a prayer) that Aurelio could have been there to see her, and went back to work checking her car before they rolled out.

 

Headed down the lift, the delayed reaction to her brashness caught up with her. Furiosa sat behind the wheel of her truck, running her fingers along the neatly stitched leather covering and watching the balcony of the Water Tower across from her. It was almost at eye level, though she couldn’t see anything between the distance and the shadows. When she closed her eyes, the grinning skull gleamed out at her from the inside of her eyelids, and she swallowed.

Ripsaw could have her shot with a word.

 _He didn’t do it_. She told herself angrily, refusing the sudden trembling in her hand. _It doesn’t mean he won’t, but today he didn’t._ She still had to stifle the urge to spit out the taste of acid in the back of her throat, and stared resolutely out the windshield as the balcony passed by above them. She revved the engine before they’d quite gotten to ground level, and the vehicle bucked as it hit the dirt. Her lancer, nicknamed Click for the way he gnashed his teeth when he was bored, let out a whoop from behind her and banged appreciatively on the roof. Furiosa hit her fist on the metal curves above her, trying on a grin. If there was anything better than doing war for banishing her dangerous lapses in strength, she hadn’t found it yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the rate the Citadel goes through War Boys, I'll never have to stop thinking up names...


	7. Chapter 7

If Ripsaw had figured out what she was doing, he didn’t seem to understand that it would end with his death. Furiosa was careful to keep her jabs just deep enough that ordering her dead would seem like an overreaction. Like a waste of resources. More than that, everything she sneered at him for he deserved, and his crew knew it. However Imperators were chosen, it wasn’t for their intelligence.

Instead of shooting her himself (which was what Furiosa would have done, in his place. Made it an honor instead of a punishment, sent the offender to Valhalla and no War Boy could ask for more than that) Ripsaw thought he’d kill her off in other ways. He set her working double and triple loads, taking up ‘slack’ in her crew and even doing the dirty work of other War Boys. Since she’d never exactly endeared herself to anyone at the Citadel, (besides maybe Ace, but it was impossible to tell under the thick shaded glasses he wore on runs) War Boys were more than happy to let her clean up their mess.

It was like going back to her first days trying to be one of them. Furiosa gritted her teeth and did her job, felt her limbs getting heavy with deferred sleep, wondering if her reflexes or Ripsaw’s stubbornness would give out first. Because she was still going out on patrols, of course, on top of all the shit work at the Citadel. And out on the Fury Road, one wrong touch of the brakes could send you right to the gates of Valhalla.

Work on her arm ground to a halt. Too tired and too busy thinking of how quick to end this, Furiosa let the almost-finished leather harness gather dust in her hiding-hole, took out the arm itself to make sure the gears were still turning every now and then. When it was ready, she’d either have time to adjust to having something resembling an arm again, or she’d be dead. The simpleness of the outcomes suited her. Furiosa was playing a dangerous game with Ripsaw, but there was only one way it could end.

And it didn’t take as long as she’d thought.

They were out on a supply run, Ripsaw in the cabin of the rumbling War Rig, driver only because of his rank and not from any particular skill with the vehicle. They had two trucks and two bikes with them, standard for a run to Gas Town and back. Ripsaw’d put Furiosa on a bike with Scraper, which should have been the most dangerous spot in the convoy. Scraper was running out of half-life, and he was edgy with the need to get into Valhalla before his time was up. Furiosa had pulled herself into the driver’s seat and glared at him until he took up the lancer’s post, grumbling all the while about how she’d try to avoid the best action.

Which she might have done, if their Imperator hadn’t assigned her to outrider point. Practically on their own, outside the protection of the heavy Rig and their own pursuit vehicles, Furiosa was absolutely certain Ripsaw had put her here as bait. Buzzards wouldn’t be bold enough to attack a convoy so close to both Gas Town and Citadel; the backup would have boiled out of both places like oil from a busted pipe.

But the Buzzards were blood-greedy, and so was Scraper, and Furiosa felt herself winding tighter than a spring as they roared down the long black road.

***

There was something in the road. The lead truck spotted it first, faint calls of _eyes on_ filtering through the high-pitched growl of her own engine and the deeper, overwhelming thunder of the War Rig. Something big enough to block the trucks, black and almost rock-like except patrols from both Gas Town and the Citadel kept this stretch of road cleaner than anything else in the Wasteland.

Furiosa shifted, pulling herself forward to brace her shortened arm better on the handlebar of the bike and turning to reach the top of a dune, her instincts screaming _danger_ but there wasn’t anything to do but barrel towards it in the convoy’s wake, outside of their line. She could see no other vehicles approaching, so maybe it was just Wasteland flotsam, washed up salvage for the return trip.

It wasn’t, Furiosa knew it, but she still almost lost control of the bike when Ripsaw turned the wheel to go around and the black thing _moved_. She skidded in the sand, fishtailing wildly while Scraper shouted at her to GET CLOSER, GET ME OVER THERE! NOW NOW NOW! FANG IT!

What had looked like one solid piece of metal turned into a vehicle like nothing Furiosa had ever seen, and the deadliest part was the barrel of a gun that was longer than her, aimed at the Rig and firing with a dull _thud_ like a thunderstick buried in sand.

If she had to give Ripsaw praise for one thing, it was this. The Imperator nearly flipped the Rig turning to take the missile in its hold rather than the cab, swung around so that he was facing back towards the Citadel even as the War Boys leapt from the lead truck onto the surface of the whatever-it-was attacking them. No Buzzards even put a vehicle out on the sands without their spikes. This thing didn’t even have _wheels_ , just huge gears along the sides that turned treads like rail tracks across them.

Smaller guns were firing from inside the thing; one War Boy folded backwards around his middle as Furiosa fanged it down the dunes, hearing Scraper cry WITNESS behind her. The crew didn’t bother looking for lids or gaps in the armor of the thing; washes of flame and noise rolled off black paint like water as Boys from the Rig threw their own thundersticks. Ripsaw was stuck hiding behind his own cargo, unwilling or unable to decouple the tanker and leave Joe’s goods behind. Furiosa gritted her teeth, tucked her legs in close to the burning-hot metal under her, and braced for the sudden surge as the bike hit black road.

The long arm of the gun swung around towards the trucks, both vehicles circling, angry and aimless without Ripsaw’s command. Furiosa swerved into the circle, matching the speed of the rear truck, Vein at the wheel. Inside the blackness, there were war cries, screams and shouts, and they blew apart Roller’s whole truck with a _boom_ like a war drum. She and Vein split apart to avoid the flaming wreck, Scraper pounding on her shoulder, wanting her to go back towards the tank.

Furiosa split off, and Vein followed. She spun around about fifty feet away from the black hill of a vehicle, tires burning new marks onto the dark road. “Don’t let them track you!” she shouted over the truck’s sullen rumble. “No patterns! Aim for the windows, get the lances from the Rig if all they’re going to do is paint burn marks on that thing!”

“You got it boss,” Vein revved the engine loud enough that she almost missed that last word, that she almost missed what it meant, and then there was just dust in her eyes and her mouth and her nose, and Scraper was leaning over her with one hand on her back.

“You think you can get a thunderstick in one of those holes?” she asked, watching the long gun swing around towards her, the only stationary thing in killing distance.

“You think you can get me close enough to stick ‘em?” Scraper snarled back, crouching down to hold his balance as Furiosa shot forward in answer, waiting until she could see all the way down that long, long barrel before pulling off to the side, listening to the clank of the gun swinging with her across the sand.

The War Rig might have been enough to flip this thing like an overturned beetle, and Furiosa knew it with a bitterness that crept up her throat. If she’d been in that cab, she wouldn’t be leaving her convoy to deal with this fight on their own. She knew, without knowing how, that if Ripsaw were dead before backup arrived, no one would so much as blink an eye.

The explosion nearly flipped her forward off the bike. A crater in the sand behind them, Scraper holding on to her scraps of shirt because that was the only thing keeping his back off the sand that would have him raw in seconds. Furiosa didn’t have a hand to spare to haul him up - she was barely able to control the bike as it was, forced to slow down or overturn for real.

“Get your shot lined up, rock-head,” she growled at him between gritted teeth. “Or would you rather be paste on the Road while the rest of them die historic?”

“Get me close enough to hit that thing and I will,” Scraper snarled back. “Hurry up and fang it before they fire at us again.”

Vein or his lancer must have passed word of what Furiosa wanted done - lancers concentrated their fire on the tiny recessed windows of the thing, but the tanker wasn’t close enough to allow any real hits. The Boys who’d tried a head on assault were dead and draped over the black vehicle like some twisted version of a Wife’s white wraps, and if Furiosa got any closer to the thing she was going to risk losing control of the bike as she ran over them.

She got as close as she could, so close that she had to slow down her loops or risk dizziness. Inside the range of the big gun, but that only meant that the smaller bullets peppered the ground around them like angry wasps.

The bullets meant that windows were open. When Scraper heaved the lance over her shoulder, Furiosa felt as much as heard the explosion shudder through the metal of the vehicle. There was barely any backwash, which meant he’d gotten all the way through to the inner workings of the thing. They didn’t have time for congratulations or anything, but Furiosa revved the engine and Scraper laughed behind her, drunk on war.

They did it twice more, until the bullets stopped pouring out of the windows and the big gun shuddered to a halt. Scraper was the first to haul himself onto the top of the thing, pulling himself free of the bike without bothering to wait for Furiosa to stop. War Boys were cheering from the back of the Rig, and for a few moments she thought the sound was the fallout of the lances in her ears.

Furiosa pulled the bike to a stop inside the range of the long gun, just in case, sitting up to watch as Scraper and Gash pulled at the hatches in the top, eager to find any survivors. This was the part she liked least about fighting – after the thrill of battle had faded and there was only murder left to do. Still, she kept watch for any others, seeing the flash of mirrors from Gas Town towers that meant help was on its way. Not that they’d need it.

Absently, she counted War Boys, eyes catching briefly on Ace as he stood up out of the cab at the back of the tanker. There were four left on the Rig, out of the ten stationed there. Socket and Flinger had been on the other bike, the first ones up on the top of the tank. They were dead. Roller and Skipper from the second truck had been blown apart right in front of her. There were more of them dead than alive, Furiosa thought, her thoughts turning dark and angry again.

And then she heard the door of the War Rig creak open. She kept her place on the bike until she saw Ripsaw coming around the side of the tanker, Alexos cringing at his side. Two more shots were fired when Gash finally got one of the hatches open, but Furiosa barely heard them. Instead her focus narrowed to the Imperator standing straight on the sand, so arrogant, and she knew without glancing at Ace that there would be no other moment like this. (If she didn’t kill him, Joe would, when he returned to the Citadel shamed, and with eight War Boys knowing it.)

Ripsaw saw her coming. Or Alexos did – the wolf snapped something at his human as Furiosa marched across the sand, but she was humming with adrenaline like nitro, and her first punch knocked the Imperator back onto the sand. She kicked the gun out of his hand, watched it spin across the ground. When Alexos tried to dart forward, she brought her boot down on his muzzle with a crunch that felt like bone.

Over the daemon’s yelping she spoke loud and angry as an engine. “You think we couldn’t have used your help? You drive the War Rig. _You’re_ the one supposed to tell us how to win, how to fight. Instead you sat in the cab like a cave lizard while _we_ did all the fighting for you.”

Ripsaw was clutching at his nose, sharing his daemon’s pain, but to keep him down Furiosa stomped her foot into his stomach, didn’t bother to watch him curl up like a grabbed pill-beetle before walking over to pick up the pistol herself. She glanced up now, seeing War Boys watching her with eyes like hubcaps. Except for Ace, who watched behind his damn tinted glasses and she couldn’t tell a thing.

Furiosa grimaced, made a show of ejecting the magazine and finding it full. “Didn’t even fire a shot to save your own skin.” She slammed the gun back together with more force than necessary, blood pounding in her head and the sun beating down like hot metal on her skin. Oh she knew what it felt like to be branded. (This was different, this was willful. There was no one in this fight but her. If she chose it she would be no better than them, just another killer.)

She did not hesitate. There was no room for weaknesses like that. Furiosa raised the gun in her whole hand, strong fingers wrapped around the trigger. She only needed one shot, she was a good aim, she’d been a lancer for hundreds of days. But she took two instead.

She shot Alexos first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not one to toot my own horn, but goddamn I love that last line.


End file.
